DO CHRISTIANS NEED REASON?

I’ve spoken to Christians who think we shouldn’t be interested in having reasons for our faith. We shouldn’t use or even consider logic or knowledge or argument or evidence to support our faith, because, they say, these things are the opposite of faith, in fact they quench it.

This is a commonly held view in my country of origin, the United Kingdom. I had one gentleman tell me that we shouldn’t be worried about whether or not God created and whether or not evolution is really a valid explanation for our world. Neither should we be interested in the return of Jesus Christ: when it might be or how it might come about or even if t will happen at all.. Neither should we be interested in finding historical or archeological evidence for our faith. The only thing that matters, said he, is faith. That is, the kind of faith that detects Jesus telling us where to park the car and which hat to wear on a Friday afternoon, and the kind of faith which make us fall over backwards when we worship.

Equally common is the idea that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with what is morally right or wrong, because that’s “judging”, and didn’t Jesus clearly say “Do not judge, or you too will be judged”? Who are we to say what’s right and what’s wrong?

Try telling that to John the Baptist, beheaded for taking a stand against immorality, of whom Jesus said:

“…among those born of women there is no one greater than John” (Luke 7: 28 NIV).

Come to think of it, try telling that to any Bible hero, prophet, or judge, including God himself. But then, such believers are normally opposed to the Scriptures, and instead set themselves up as the determiner of what is right or wrong. “I think…” you can hear them say frequently, while they ignore what Paul said, what Moses said, what John said, and what Jesus Christ said.

Part of the problem is that people have caved in to secular notions of origins and of history, because they’ve become convinced that the unbelievers, those who now hold the majority of positions of authority and so are pushing any remaining believers out, must be right. To my mind, this is not faith, it’s a lackof faith: it’s a failure to believe, for example, that “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth”. It’s a failure to believe that Almighty God is capable of writing His own book and telling the truth.

Once you decide that the Scriptures (ie the Bible) are not your authority, but that you are, or your preacher is, or your church is, or your favorite pop star is, you are on shifting sands in an earthquake: there is no absolute truth. Someone else’s thoughts are as valid as yours, even if they are totally opposite.

Worse than that, you are at the mercy of a world which is determined to judge you, and to tell you what is right and what’s wrong, what reality is, and what truth is.

As my son sits in his science class at school, he analyses and sifts what his teacher is saying. He recognizes that the teacher is on an evangelistic mission-not so much to teach science as to convert his captive audience to…atheism. At the mercy of this teacher- apart from my son who at home has been given reasons to believe- are thirty young people, many of whom come from Christian or Mormon homes, who’ve been given no preparatory grounding in the concepts which would help protect and grow their faith.

Parents have been too busy teaching their kids what makes a good football player, and their churches haven’t joined the battle being waged against them. They are so brainwashed and hypnotized by TV and “news” media that they “didn’t think it was important”, or were convinced that the evolutionists have the evidence for nothing-to-man evolution all sewn up. And so they bow to the evangelists of our day-the militant atheists-and surrender their children to those who “must know what they are talking about” since they are the ones in the position of authority.

Picture Theoden, under the spell of Wormtongue and Saruman….and you will see a good representation of not only the unbelieving world in the West, but also a large percentage of the professing Christian world, hypnotized and comatose, while all around them the world falls under the spell of the atheist…and his master.

While it’s true that the Bible says “the just shall live by faith”, and that “without faith it is impossible to please God”, and that if you have faith as small as a mustard seed you can move a mountain, it also teaches and speaks out the message that if you have no source of absolute truth apart from your own ideas and those of people who are anti-Christ, you have no real basis for truth at all: you might as well believe that Spiderman is God, that right is wrong, and that everyone with a “z” in their name is going to heaven while the rest spend eternity in Disneyworld.

Why did God give us these amazing brains, capable of processing far more information than most of us challenge them with? Was it so that we could store the latest football stats and the theories and rantings of the evolutionist, or was it so that we could learn about God and His world?

Do you believe in Jesus? What did he say? He said to the Father:

“…your word is truth” (John 17:17).

He also said:

“If ye continue in my word then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8: 31-32 KJV).

This was a dominant theme of Christ and of his apostles, such as Paul, who said:

“All Scripture is God-breathed…” (2 Timothy 3:16).

And for those who have convinced themselves that the Old Testament is a collection of fairy stories and can be ignored, I would say that you need to survey all the numerous references of Jesus and his apostles to Old Testament scriptures, in which it is obvious that they believed them to be the inspired words of the living God:

“He (Jesus) said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (Luke 24: 25).

“Haven’t your read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female…?” (Matthew 19:4).

There really is no excuse to ignore reason, particularly in this age of deception, when the world-seen and unseen-is working hard at robbing you and your children of their faith and hope. There is abundant evidence which defies the lies of the atheist and the skeptic, if you would just take the trouble to look and to share. And remember this:

“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).